A fire tore through a document storage room on the eighth floor of a nine-story building at King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok early Thursday morning, causing extensive damage but no reported injuries, according to several news sources.
The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration’s 199 emergency hotline received the first report at 6:47 a.m., with the blaze located inside the university on Pracharat Sai 1 Road in the Wong Sawang area of Bang Sue district. Firefighters and rescue officers from the Bang Pho Fire and Rescue Station responded to the scene shortly after.
When crews arrived, they found heavy smoke pouring from the building’s eighth floor. Firefighters entered the structure and worked to bring the fire under control before turning their attention to clearing smoke from the seventh and eighth floors. A preliminary inspection determined that the fire started inside a document storage room, where paperwork and other stored materials sustained extensive damage.
No injuries or deaths were reported in connection with the blaze, and the fire did not appear to spread beyond the affected floors. Authorities have not released an estimate of the total damage. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok, commonly known by its acronym KMUTNB, is one of Thailand’s leading public universities focused on engineering, applied science and technology. The institution traces its roots to 1959, when it was founded as the Thai-German Technical School through a partnership between the Thai government and what was then the Federal Republic of Germany. It became an independent university in 1986 and took its current name in 2007, when it gained status as an autonomous state university. Its main campus sits in the Bang Sue area of Bangkok, with additional campuses in Prachinburi and Rayong provinces. The university enrolls tens of thousands of undergraduate and graduate students and is widely regarded as one of the country’s top institutions for technical and engineering education.
Thursday’s fire adds to a string of building fires that have struck Bangkok in recent weeks, underscoring ongoing concerns about fire safety in the capital’s aging commercial and institutional buildings. Structure fires involving stored materials, whether paper records, electronics or retail goods, have posed particular challenges for fire crews this year due to the density of combustible material and the difficulty of accessing upper floors quickly.
For now, officials say their priority is completing the damage assessment and determining what ignited the blaze inside the storage room. Fire investigators typically examine factors such as electrical wiring, faulty equipment and improperly stored materials when determining the origin of fires in institutional buildings, though no official cause had been confirmed as of now.
